PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA is trying to pick up the pace of hiring bus drivers, in an effort to solve a driver shortage that has led to frequent route delays.
It hasn’t been uncommon lately for SEPTA to post delays on bus routes, sometimes up to two dozen routes a day, because there aren’t enough drivers to cover for those who call out.
Pre-COVID, SEPTA would hire 24 bus drivers a month, while 22 would leave through normal attrition. The labor pool took a hit when SEPTA imposed a hiring freeze in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Our natural attrition continued, so we lost a little ground there,” said SEPTA assistant general manager for operations Scott Sauer.
The result is that SEPTA is currently 83 bus drivers short of a full complement of 2,722.
Once the hiring freeze was lifted in July of 2020, SEPTA encountered the same tough labor market facing other employers, Sauer said.
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“We were not hiring at a rate that we had grown accustomed to prior to the pandemic,” he told KYW Newsradio.
Compounding the problem, Sauer said, was that the process of training new hires was slower because of social distancing.
Sauer said the pace of hiring, though, is beginning to pick up.
“We’ve started now hiring not just the 24 a month that we used to hire but we’re expediting trying to hire 28 every three weeks now for the rest of this year. So we’re trying to build back up,” he said.
Sauer says SEPTA hopes to have a full staff of bus drivers by the end of the year.
“We’re going to keep up that pace through the remainder of the calendar year and reevaluate where we are. We’re hopeful that we can recover most of that loss in that timeframe.”
The labor contract with the union representing bus drivers, Transport Workers Local 234, expires at the end of October.
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